Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!kth!sunic!liuida!prosys!ath
From: ath@helios.prosys.se (Anders Thulin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: RISC and emulated languages
Message-ID: <416@helios.prosys.se>
Date: 2 May 89 08:13:42 GMT
References: <158@bms-at.UUCP> <2624@scolex.sco.COM>
Reply-To: ath@prosys.se
Organization: Programsystem AB, Linkoping, SWEDEN
Lines: 22

In article <2624@scolex.sco.COM> seanf@scolex.UUCP (Sean Fagan) writes:
>In article <158@bms-at.UUCP> stuart@bms-at.UUCP (Stuart Gathman) writes:
>>I first noticed this in benchmark results for the ARM where BASIC ran the
>>benchmarks faster than C!
>
>*sigh*  This is the result of a nice BASIC interpreter, written in
>highly-optimized, hand-coded assembly language, versus a poor C compiler.

The ARM C compiler (from Norcroft) is actually quite good. I wouldn't
expect a compute-bound integer benchmark to run faster in Basic than
in C.  A floating-point benchmark probably would, though, as the ARM
Basic uses its own FP format, while C uses the IEEE emulator.

>In other words, it's not a feature of RISC architecture.

This may still be true, though.

-- 
Anders Thulin			INET : ath@prosys.se
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